Matt Glaser via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Matt Glaser:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix via ↴
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Matt Glaser
- City: Somerville, Massachusetts
- Country: United States
- Hometown: Brooklyn, NY
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Jazz and bluegrass violinist Matt Glaser served as chair of the Berklee String Department for 28 years. Known as much for his versatility as his virtuosity, Glaser's vast knowledge and experience in music has fueled collaborations with a wide range of artists, from cellist Yo-Yo Ma to filmmaker Ken Burns.
He has released two albums as leader of Wayfaring Strangers and has appeared on scores of other recordings, including discs released by his former students such as Tracy Bonham and Alex Hargreaves. His long list of other musical collaborators includes David Grisman, Bob Dylan, and Vassar Clements.
(from www.berklee.edu/people/matt-glaser)
Contact Information
- Email: mglaser@berklee.edu
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Book Purchases: http://www.homespun.com/instructors/matt-glaser/
- ▶ Book Purchases 2: http://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Violin-Matt-Glaser/dp/0825601940
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCc7tgaSwZ14Fu8OmTIm-4-A
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/75NRpMsOXQ7xFQ5H97t6d3
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
"I like a lot of different styles of music. I think it's because I have a short attention span. So I become at least a dilettante in playing different things.
With my group, the Wayfaring Strangers, I just want to play like myself regardless of the style. When I'm playing jazz there is always an element of bluegrass mixed in. And when I'm playing bluegrass, there is always an element of jazz."
"I started out playing old-time country music. I heard that kind of music on a television commercial for corn chips, and I said, 'I want a violin.' My childhood teacher was Paul Ehrlich. I will always aspire to be as good a teacher as he is. The lesson would go on as long as it needed to go on. Afterwards we would go out for ice cream. It was a lived experience. A good teacher can really change the life of a student."
"I'm not the world's most methodical teacher. But I think I make very strong demands on people who study with me. For instance, having people play ideas in all 12 keys. And I expect my students to learn by listening and not just reading. I think it's important for students to have a mental map of music in their mind."
"I'm proud of the fact that I've played with a very wide range of musicians, from Yo-Yo Ma to Bob Dylan to Ralph Stanley. I enjoy finding what's valuable in all these different worlds. I'll always remember playing at Carnegie Hall for Stephane Grappelli's 80th birthday. The encore was 'Tiger Rag,' and I was standing next to Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O'Connor. As we were all bowing at the end, Yo-Yo Ma said, 'I was totally lost.'"
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
